Women in the Media

Women in the Media

 

Over the past couple days in class we have talked about how women are portrayed in the media and how it affects teenagers and young adults. We watched a little bit of a video called Miss Representation that did a good job showing how the way women in the media look, affect the way how young teenagers want to look. After watching some of the video I found a couple different claims. Do I agree with the claims? Yes and no.

Each different story we watched in Miss Representation, they all talked about how young teenage girls want to look or act like the women in the media. This is what I disagree with. Why do they happen to think that all teenage girls want to be like these women in the media? I know that there are a lot of girls that are upset about their appearance like shown in this survey here, but then there are girls out there that don’t care at all. Most of the time, the girls that don’t care are the ones overweight. Notice I said most of the time. I know that some girls that are overweight try very hard to lose weight but most overweight teenagers don’t do anything about it.

What I said earlier about reporters thinking all teenage girls want to be like the women in the media is not very fair. By them not saying not every teenage girl does this bothers me because I know that some girls do not even care about the looks of women in the media. I mean every person that sees a nice body or pretty makeup on a woman in a magazine is going to comment on it, saying “Wow she has a nice body” or “Look how pretty her makeup is”, but just because they say that doesn’t mean it’s going to change the way they want to look.

One clip that was shown in the video was this women was expecting a baby girl and she was saying how she doesn’t want her little girl to turn out how the young girls are now a days. Throughout the video she used ethos and pathos. Ethos were used by trying to make herself look good. Pathos were used because there was a lot of emotion in the video and making people watching the video feel bad for her. She said in the video that her sister died at a young age and that she felt like she had to act as two daughters since her parents lost one. But really how does that have anything to do with her not wanting her daughter to be like the girls today?

I do believe that the majority of teenage girls aren’t happy with their body which is messed up. Something does need to be fixed about it because most of the girls that aren’t happy with their body are the girls that are perfectly fine, not over weight or anything. The girls that are happy with their body should be the ones trying to lose weight. This video does a good job showing young adults how reality TV should not affect the way you want to look. If you haven’t seen the video, I would recommend watching it.

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